CHAPTER 1 Introduction

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY

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N 1992, when I published Cinema of (Mexico’s Nuevo Cine) of the ’70s, the lull Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican in the ’80s and ’90s, to its current renaissance Film, 1967–1983, it was the fi rst in this millennium with the rise of con- I book-length critical study of Mexi- temporary auteurs such as Alfonso Cuarón, can cinema in English. Since then, Guillermo del Toro, María Novarro, Alejan- I am happy to report, there has been a boom dro González Iñárritu, Carlos Reygadas, Luis in the research and publishing of Mexican Estrada, Mariana Chenillo, and Fernando fi lm history and criticism, both in English Eimbcke, among others. Some critics and and in Spanish. It is heartening to see so much historians, myself included, have focused work of such high quality busily investigating their attention on the Cine de Oro, the trans- Mexico’s rich and fascinating cinema. formative two-decade-long Golden Age that This fl ourishing Mexican fi lm literature lasted from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s. has employed numerous approaches and During that time, Mexican cinema rose from covered all historical periods, from the earli- near extinction at the end of the silent era to est days of the medium’s arrival in Mexico, become the most successful Latin American through the silent era, the Golden Age, the cinema and the leading Spanish-language fi lm subsequent crisis in the 1960s, the resurgence industry in the world.

FACING: Detail of fi gure 6.48.

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 1 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM But despite the fl urry of research and This is followed by a chapter covering publishing, the systematic study of the style the beginning of Mexican sound fi lms in the of Mexican cinema has hardly been touched early 1930s and the resulting rebirth of Mex- upon. Other than Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro’s ico’s cinema production. Aft er that are three monograph on Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico,1 chapters that focus on the fi lms produced by articles I have published (which have been the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three extensively reworked here), an essay by Evan successive decades: Fernando de Fuentes’s in- Lieberman and Kerry Hegarty,2 and another fl uential Revolution Trilogy from the 1930s; by Patrick Keating,3 the investigation of the the collaboration of Emilio Fernández and poetics of Mexican fi lms in general and of his fi lmmaking unit, especially the fi lms they the most honored fi lms of the Golden Age made during the 1940s; and the Mexican fi lms in particular is still in its infancy. This book of the Spaniard Luis Buñuel, who moved to addresses that lack by examining the poetics Mexico in the mid-1940s, became a Mexican of the Golden Age’s Classical Mexican Cin- citizen, and directed more than twenty fi lms ema, the name I have given to the era’s most there during the next nineteen years. My last esteemed fi lms. analytical chapter looks at three exceptional My investigation concentrates on the genre fi lms directed by three important development of Mexican fi lm in the fi rst half Golden Age directors—Juan Bustillo Oro, of the twentieth century. Beginning with the Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho—in pre-cinema and early cinema period at the the 1930s and 1940s. turn of the previous century, I analyze the illustrations of the prolifi c artist, cartoon- Methodology: Neoformalism, ist, and illustrator José Guadalupe Posada to Neoauteurism, and Cultural Studies note how his engravings set the stage for the Mexican fi lmmakers who would soon follow. My analytical method combines neoformal- My claim is that Posada was the font from ism and neoauteurism, which will be de- which Mexican fi lm as a whole and what I call ployed within a cultural studies framework. the Classical Mexican Cinema fl owed. Then I Neoformalist analysis is the “poetics of fi lm” examine the poetics of Enrique Rosas’s El au- approach pioneered by Kristin Thompson tomóvil gris (1919), the crowning achievement in Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film of Mexico’s silent fi lmmaking. Based on an Analysis (1988),4 and used extensively since infamous string of revolution-era crimes, this then by her and David Bordwell in numer- remarkable docudrama marked the national ous books, articles, and blog posts.5 In part, cinema’s transition from documentaries that The Classical Mexican Cinema is modeled on dominated national fi lmmaking from its Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film and, inception in 1896 to the mid-1910s to narra- to an extent, his books on Yasujiro Ozu (Ozu tive fi lms that have commanded Mexican fi lm and the Poetics of Cinema) and Carl Theodore production ever since. As such, El automóvil Dreyer (The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer).6 gris set the stage for the Golden Age fi lms that Because so little formal analysis of Mexican came aft er the introduction of sound. fi lms exists, this approach provides me with

2 The Classical Mexican Cinema

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 2 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM an orderly way of detailing the style of the Furthermore, there is no reason why Classical Mexican Cinema of the Golden Age. neoformalism cannot aid in unveiling a fi lm’s Moreover, neoformalism has a number of ideological stance. In Ozu and the Poetics of other investigative benefi ts, enumerated by Cinema, Bordwell used the results of his Bordwell in his second introduction to his poetics of cinema analysis as the basis for a Ozu book: discussion about how those fi lms transmitted political ideology.10 Indeed, I did much the Through the lens of poetics we can same thing in chapter 2 of Latino Images in systematically study a director’s subjects, Film, where I performed a thorough neo- themes, formal strategies, and stylistic formalist reading of a four-minute scene in strategies, taken in relation to the norm- Falling Down (1992) in order to demonstrate driven practices of his period and place. how following the standardized practices of The poetics framework is historical, Hollywood fi lmmaking may inadvertently because it mounts causal explanations of serve to perpetuate the stereotyping of ethnic the movies’ distinctive qualities. It’s also minorities.11 Of course, a lot depends on how analytical, because it asks us to scrutinize the critical method is employed. To be sure, choices made by the director.7 neoformalism can be practiced in an overly narrow, reductive, and shortsighted way—as Since studying the subjects, themes, and can any analytical approach. However, ap- formal and stylistic strategies of the afore- plied appropriately, which I hope to do here, mentioned Mexican fi lmmakers and their it need not be. fi lms is precisely my goal, the poetics of fi lm A second key analytical tool I utilize in approach perfectly suits my objectives here. this book is neoauteurism. Just as neoformal- I recognize that some critics regard the ism is a reconceptualized version of formal- kind of neoformalist analysis practiced by ism, neoauteurism is similarly a more nu- Thompson and Bordwell as ahistorical and anced rethinking of auteurism, the analysis antithetical to cultural studies,8 but I don’t see of fi lms based on who directed them. Here anything inherent in the method that makes I take my cues from two critics whose work it so. Indeed, as Bordwell himself states, the I deeply respect, Robin Wood and Dolores poetics of cinema approach is meant to in- Tierney. Both of them have published signifi - vestigate style within a context, “in relation,” cant works on individual directors12 without that is, “to the norm-driven practices” of the resorting to vulgar auteurism of the sort director’s period and place. Properly utilized, whereby the critic simplistically searches for then, neoformalism is historical. It situates patterns of directorial fl ourishes that prove fi lmmakers and their fi lms in a particular authorship and provide a reason for assigning time and place. And it is analytical—not directors to a cinematic pantheon. I am aware merely descriptive—since it carefully consid- of the problems occasioned by the excesses of ers the choices directors made and asks why early examples of auteurist criticism, which they made them.9 are neatly summarized by Wood:

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY 3

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 3 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM Auteurism emphasized the personal Though I am still following the standard signature at the expense of everything else auteurist methodology—looking for stylistic (sometimes valuing a director’s work just patterns and their repetition within a particu- because it could be demonstrated to have lar director’s body of work—it is my aim to one) and, at the worst, claimed or at least be attentive enough to see the forest and the implied that the author was solely and trees. One crippling pitfall of auteurism as exclusively responsible for the meaning it is sometimes practiced is that while going and quality of his texts. Its opponents about its business of spotting an overarching countered this by pointing out that the directorial style across a director’s fi lmog- author did not invent the language and raphy, it fails to fully appreciate individual conventions of his medium, the genre works, especially when they break from within which the work was located, the established patterns. This type of auteurism ideological assumptions inherent in the thus makes criticism a self-fulfi lling proph- culture and necessarily reproduced . . . in ecy—fi nding the pattern, looking for its the individual text; neither did the author repetitions, and ignoring elements that don’t control the conditions of production.13 fi t. Here I have tried to be alive to patterns as well as to their absence, and to be alert to a By using the term “neoauteurism,” I mean to director discarding one style in favor of an- signal the use of a more fi nely calibrated type other, since this might signal a new phase in of analysis of a director’s body of work. Like an artist’s work, perhaps inaugurating a new Tierney in her masterful study of Emilio pattern. Thus, for example, I note how the Fernández, I concede that I am taking a exhilarating cinematic experimentation ex- “director-centered approach”14 in this book. hibited in de Fuentes’s Revolution Trilogy is And like Wood, in his infl uential book on largely absent in the fi lms he made aft erward; Hitchcock, while using it I will strive “to how Fernández’s 1950s fi lms diff er so mark- take into account and make use of the many edly from those he made the previous decade; valuable critical developments” of the past and how Buñuel’s Mexican fi lms evolved thirty or so years in fi lm studies, including, stylistically as they became more surreal. as Wood puts it, “work on generic conven- tion, the principles of classical narrative, the I will ground my neoformalist and neo- construction of ‘classical Hollywood fi lms’ auteurist analyses in a cultural studies both overall and from shot to shot, stars and approach, situating the fi lms I treat within how they signify, [and] the relations of fi lms several contexts: historical, social, cultural, to our culture’s construction of gender.”15 economic, industrial, ideological, and—be- Naturally, I’ll do this within the Mexican cause so much of Mexican fi lmmaking his- context. And I’ll take note of the play of ide- tory revolves around its fi lmmakers’ vexed ology—both personal and social—within an relationship to Hollywood—global. Films individual fi lm, across a body of work, within are never produced in a vacuum, and it myself, and as it infl ects my own critical behooves the historian and critic to be aware assumptions. of and sensitive to the complex network of

4 The Classical Mexican Cinema

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 4 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM motivations, decisions, dreams, and desires from our close readings and take the bigger bound up in the making of each one. This picture into account. This case demonstrates is the reason I begin a book on Golden Age the complexities of international political and cinema by examining the cultural history economic dynamics, and reveals how events of image making in Mexico at the turn of may push and pull fi lmmakers in diff erent the twentieth century. Starting there is the ways, impact fi lmmaking, and shape a nation’s best way to appreciate how the work of the fi lm culture. Let’s consider the reopening of prolifi c printmaker José Guadalupe Posada global fi lm markets aft er World War II and created a visual template that the next gen- the diverse eff ects it had on two masterful eration of artists and fi lmmakers would use Golden Age directors, Emilio Fernández and as they set out to create authentic Mexican Luis Buñuel. For the fi rst, the change severely art forms. Posada profoundly infl uenced art- damaged his standing as Mexico’s most lauded ists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clem- auteur and spelled the beginning of the end ente Orozco, and Diego Rivera, and they in of his career. For the other, the reopened Eu- turn infl uenced fi lmmakers such as director ropean markets brought him to the attention Emilio Fernández and cinematographer of international fi lm fi nanciers, which led to Gabriel Figueroa. Another example high- more fi lmmaking possibilities, reinvigorated lights the discrepancy that may arise between his cinematic creativity, and helped popu- artistic intention and viewer reception. larize him as one of the foremost auteurs of Emilio Fernández was proud of his Kikapú world cinema. Indian ancestry. So it is no surprise that what Aft er 1950, Emilio Fernández’s fi lms brought him to the attention of international began looking more mainstream, containing audiences and critics was María Candelaria fewer elements of the signature style he had (1943), a fi lm where two top Mexican movie developed in the 1940s. One reason was that stars, Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz, he wasn’t always able to work with the team played indigenous protagonists. And yet of collaborators that had assisted him in his despite the fact that Fernández’s goal was ’40s fi lms. Another was the overall decline to celebrate indios and expose their deplor- in the quality of Mexican fi lmmaking in able treatment, the fi lm’s depiction of them the 1950s, due to falling box offi ce receipts, is deeply confl icted. At best, it sent mixed dwindling profi ts, and shrinking budgets. messages about Mexico’s indigenous people; These were primarily caused by a change in at worst, it was yet another stereotypical Hollywood’s attitude toward the Mexican representation of them. movie market. During World War II, at the One more example will illustrate the urging of the U.S. government, Hollywood necessity for the fi lm critic to be aware backed off from dominating Mexico’s fi lm of multiple contexts in analyzing a direc- market. With the war over and the U.S. no tor’s work. This is especially important for longer in need of a strong hemispheric ally, neoformalist critics, and serves as a reminder Hollywood aggressively sought to recap- that, from time to time, we need to step back ture Mexico’s screens. Its success devastated

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY 5

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 5 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM Mexican fi lmmaking. Consequently, Fernán- Mexico’s Filmic Golden Age: dez had to scramble to make fi lms for less The Classical Mexican Cinema and money and on shorter schedules than he had the Mainstream Mexican Cinema become accustomed to in the 1940s. His fi lms suff ered along with his reputation. Mexico’s movie industry can be traced back Ironically, this downturn in Mexican to the earliest days of silent fi lm, but as the fi lmmaking had a salubrious aff ect on Bu- nation rebuilt aft er its revolution (1910–20), ñuel. A disciplined fi lmmaker who prepared Mexican fi lms were much less popular than meticulously, he had learned to operate with Hollywood’s with Mexican audiences. “The tight budgets and on short schedules. As he American-made fi lm—of whatever qual- gradually gained the ability to make the fi lms ity,” fi lm historian Aurelio de los Reyes has he wanted to make, many of his releases were written, “had been . . . the favorite of the well received nationally and internation- entire Mexican public” since the late 1910s.16 ally, and his career blossomed in the 1950s. Hollywood overwhelmed Mexico’s nascent His fi lms’ increasing critical and commercial fi lm industry, and by the late 1920s, Mexi- success outside of Mexico led to his securing can fi lm production had almost completely foreign fi nancing for his projects. Eventually, disappeared.17 Of the 244 fi lms exhibited in Buñuel moved his fi lmmaking to Europe, and Mexico City in 1930, for example, 196 (80.4 the fi lms of his second French period found a percent) were Hollywood fi lms, and only large international art fi lm audience. four (1.6 percent) were Mexican.18 Thus a single historic event, the postwar As we will see, Hollywood’s fi lm aesthetic shift in movie marketing and fi nancing, became the accepted standard in Mexico— impacted the fates of two Classical Mexican and indeed throughout the world. Though Cinema directors in contrasting ways, bad for the Mexican fi lm industry made a Phoenix- one, good for the other. There was nothing like rebirth with sound fi lm in the early positive about the net eff ect on Mexican fi lm 1930s and had matured into a formidable culture, however. It was disastrous. Mexico national cinema by the end of that decade, lost two star auteurs, the quality of fi lms Mexico’s audiences had grown accustomed dropped signifi cantly, the Golden Age ended, to the Hollywood way of telling stories. In and Mexican moviegoers abandoned their the main, and to the chagrin of fi lm aesthetes national cinema. Mexican fi lm spiraled into a who had hoped that Mexico would develop long decline, the most drastic since the 1920s. its own national cinematic aesthetic, Mexican As I hope this brief historical sketch indi- cinema adopted the Hollywood fi lmmaking cates, as much as possible I will place my close paradigm. readings within multiple contexts, and always As described by David Bordwell in The consider the implications of my fi ndings on Classical Hollywood Cinema, the defi nitive the broader story of Mexican cinema—and study of the American studio style from 1917 vice versa. to 1960 that he coauthored with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, this paradigm is a set of cinematic norms for the fi ction fi lm

6 The Classical Mexican Cinema

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 6 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM that includes elements encompassed by three majority of the Golden Age movies came systems. First, the paradigm entails a system from the MMC, works that had clearly adopted of narrative logic centered on cause-and- the Hollywood style, if with a Mexican fl avor. eff ect linkages of story events, a goal-oriented The CMC, on the other hand, was a smaller protagonist, and the adherence to Aristotelian but infl uential group of alternative fi lms, narrative poetics. Second, it features a system many of which got noticed at home and at of cinematic time that governs everything international festivals and are now consid- from shot duration to the temporal order- ered canonical classics of the nation’s cinema. ing of shots to favored story devices such as These were fi lms made by directors in search fl ashbacks and deadlines. Third, it involves a of a Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinc- spatial system that constitutes fi lmic space as tive fi lm form to express lo mexicano (Mexi- story space. Compositions privilege human canness). Though a minority practice, they bodies, centering and balancing them in the were not by any means all that esoteric or frame.19 uncommon, but rather products of the same The classical Hollywood fi lmmaking industry as the MMC. Indeed, one of the most model, both as signifying practice and as fascinating aspects of the Cine de Oro is that industrial mode of production (including the Classical Mexican Cinema contested the studio and star systems, powerful producers, MMC while appearing alongside it. Mexican well-developed distribution networks, and fi lm culture was spacious enough to allow exhibition chains), was imitated in Mexico fi lms such as Fernando de Fuentes’s Revolu- by the late 1930s as it embarked on what is tion Trilogy, the Fernández unit’s dramas and now recognized as its cinematic Golden Age melodramas, Julio Bracho’s searing indict- (el Cine de Oro), roughly from 1936 through ment of the postrevolutionary status quo, 1957. Actually, most Mexican fi lms adopted and Buñuel’s surrealist provocations to play as well as adapted the Hollywood model, in theaters one week and then be followed giving the Hollywood paradigm a decidedly the next by conventional, largely genre- Mexican infl ection.20 By and large, as far as based MMC movies—comedies, melodramas, fi lm style was concerned, the nation’s fi lms cabaretera fi lms, or comedias rancheras. More- adhered to the Hollywood model; however, over, these CMC deviations from the Mexican there was a small but formidable fi lmmaking fi lmic norm also played beside the slew of faction that rejected Hollywood’s paradigm Hollywood fi lms being exhibited in Mexico outright. As a consequence, a central feature at the time. These CMC fi lms, then, off ered a of Mexican cinema history in the fi rst half of look at “another cinema,” one that—from de the twentieth century is the dynamic tension Fuentes’s El prisionero 13 (Prisoner 13) in 1933 between those that followed the Hollywood to Buñuel’s last Mexican-made fi lm, Simón style and those that spurned it. del desierto (Simon of the Desert) in 1965—suc- Accordingly, I have divided Mexico’s cessfully established itself apart from the Golden Age cinema into two groups of fi lms: standard Hollywood, European, and Mexican the Mainstream Mexican Cinema (MMC) and fi lms that commanded most of the screen the Classical Mexican Cinema (CMC). The time in the nation’s theaters.

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY 7

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 7 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM This heterogeneous mix of MMC’s com- The MMC generally followed Hollywood’s mercial fi lms and CMC’s formal experimen- lead in everything from its star system and tation was much diff erent from the ho- producer-based industrial organization down mogeneous—well nigh monolithic—U.S. to shooting, editing, and lighting styles, set Hollywood fi lmmaking during the same era, design, costuming, and makeup, as well as where cases of formal experimentation were scripting and acting conventions. Since MMC rare. As David Bordwell famously declared fi lms adhered so closely to the classical Holly- about the U.S. fi lm industry’s output from wood cinema, a style that has been thor- 1917 to 1960: “In Hollywood cinema, there oughly explicated by Bordwell, Thompson, are no subversive fi lms, only subversive mo- and Staiger,22 I feel that a neoformalist exami- ments. For social and economic reasons, no nation of those movies would be redundant Hollywood fi lm can provide a distinct and and unnecessary. coherent alternative to the classical model.”21 What does need to be analyzed, how- My claim in this book is that for Mexico’s ever, is the poetics of the Classical Mexican Golden Age cinema the situation was just Cinema. Though these fi lms were a numerical the opposite. Major fi lm artists were ener- minority, their impact on Mexican fi lm his- getically exploring alternatives, consciously tory was at least equal to and arguably greater seeking a distinctive stylistic structure for than the majority MMC. These vibrant and Mexican movies. The fi lms they produced signifi cant movies were exceptional, a term deviated from the formal norm and expressed I use in my title in two senses. First, I mean something diff erent thematically, stylisti- to indicate those Mexican fi lms that were cally, and ideologically. In addition, these deemed extraordinary by virtue of their gar- fi lms were deliberate attempts to counter the nering worldwide attention, critical acclaim, Mainstream Mexican Cinema, which Clas- and awards both at home and at international sical Mexican Cinema directors regarded festivals—fi lms, that is, like Fernández’s as undistinguished, uninspired, and highly María Candelaria (1943), which put Mexican derivative. The Mexican case is more similar cinema on the international moviemaking to that in France, especially the fi lms made map, and like Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950) there between the two world wars, when the and Él (1953), which kept it there. Second, fi lm culture spectrum was expansive enough I use “exceptional” to point out that in the to include experiments on one end, main- context of Mexican Golden Age fi lmmak- stream commercial ventures on the other, ing the CMC fi lms were the exceptions, not and many intriguing blends of the two poles the run-of-the-mill industrial product. They in between. By producing fi lms that greatly intentionally did not look or feel like main- broadened the range of Mexican cinema, CMC stream Mexican fi lms, and proudly stood directors successfully countered Hollywood apart stylistically and ideologically. in two ways. They made fi lms that broke away This meant that their domestic recep- from the Hollywood paradigm, and in so tion was oft en mixed. Some CMC fi lms were doing they established a Mexican fi lm culture critically and commercially successful at very diff erent from that of the United States. home and abroad, like Fernández’s fi rst fi lms

8 The Classical Mexican Cinema

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 8 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM with Dolores del Río, Flor silvestre and María keep in mind that it wasn’t so much that the Candelaria (both 1943). Others failed at the elements present in CMC fi lms were entirely box offi ce and were shunned by local critics, absent in the MMC. Rather, it’s that all three only to be lauded overseas or rediscovered by of these features were regularly present in CMC a later generation, reevaluated, and eventually fi lms, and present to a greater degree than in added to the canon of great Mexican fi lms. their MMC counterparts, and that they were This was the case with de Fuentes’s ¡Vámonos deliberately placed there by their directors. con Pancho Villa! (1936) as well as Buñuel’s First, the CMC was self-consciously au- Los olvidados (1950), two fi rst-run failures teurist—carefully planned and executed by that would rank #1 and #2 in a 1994 poll of fi lmmakers with an explicit aesthetic and Mexican fi lmmakers, critics, and historians ideological agenda. It’s fair to say that most of conducted by Somos magazine.23 Just as some the MMC fi lms were quickly made entertain- of the CMC fi lms were immediately popular ments produced to clear a profi t. Similarly, and others were not, some were genre fi lms, many CMC fi lms were made by frugal produc- and some were more diffi cult to categorize. ers hoping to make money. But the diff erence But they were just as unmistakably Mexican was that CMC directors were thinking beyond as the MMC fi lms (though we might have to their fi lms’ commercial potential. They had exclude Buñuel’s literary adaptations, Robinson something to say, wanted to say it in a special Crusoe [1954] and Abismos de pasión [Wuthering way, and wanted viewers to take notice. Fer- Heights, 1954]). Formally, however, they were nando de Fuentes’s Revolution Trilogy was defi nitely idiosyncratic—vigorously accentu- the director’s harshly critical commentary ating a distinctive cinematic style in order to on the failure of the 1910–20 revolution. assert mexicanidad (Mexicanness). Unlike the majority of the happily resolved The CMC was mostly the work of three fi lms of the MMC, de Fuentes’s trilogy was auteurs: Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio composed of tragedies that raised the chill- Fernández’s fi lmmaking unit (comprised of ing possibility that the disappointing and Fernández, screenwriter Mauricio Magda- dispiriting outcome of the revolutionary war leno, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, might have been due to an inherent fl aw in and editor Gloria Schoemann), and, interest- the Mexican character. As de Fuentes said at ingly enough, the Spanish-born Luis Buñuel. the time of the release of El compadre Mendoza Besides the works of these directors, in chap- (1934), the second fi lm of the trilogy: ter 8 I’ll discuss three more exceptional fi lms, directed by Bustillo Oro, Best Maugard, and It would have been easy to narrate the Bracho. plot [of El compadre Mendoza] in such a way that the conclusion was a happy one How were the CMC fi lms, which are the focus like we are used to seeing in American of this book, diff erent from the Mainstream fi lms; but it is our opinion that Mexican Mexican Cinema? A short list of CMC char- cinema ought to be a faithful refl ection of acteristics will help explain the distinction I our way of being, bleak and tragic, if what am making. As I work my way down the list, we are attempting is to present truthful

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY 9

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 9 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM profi les of ourselves, rather than making noticed. As mentioned above and as will be a poor imitation of what we are given by discussed in chapter 5, de Fuentes intention- Hollywood.24 ally gave all three fi lms of the Revolution Trilogy tragic endings that he felt were truer Similarly, Emilio Fernández’s fi lms that he to the Mexican experience. Consequently, the made with Gabriel Figueroa and the other dramatic structure of these fi lms was emphat- members of his fi lmmaking team were a ically unlike that of the MMC and resulted in direct attack on the MMC, which Fernández a diff erent viewing experience for audiences. derided as hardly Mexican at all, and little Fernández and Figueroa were so staunchly more than Hollywood in Spanish. Fernán- opposed to MMC fi lmmaking that they devel- dez and Figueroa’s shared ambition was to oped a nationalistic cinematic style to depict create a uniquely Mexican cinema, fi lms that Mexico visually, one heavily infl uenced by unambiguously and unmistakably explored Mexican painters, graphic artists, and mural- Mexican themes, portrayed Mexican charac- ists. The whole point of their formally ambi- ters, and were set in a landscape that would tious project was for audiences to notice that be recognized by fi lmgoers the world over their fi lms looked diff erent. As I’ll show in as—and only as—Mexico.25 the three fi lms I analyze in chapter 8, direc- For his part, Luis Buñuel worked out an tors Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, informal arrangement with his fi rst pro- and Julio Bracho operated out of the same ducer, the Russian émigré Oscar Dancigers, desire to experiment beyond the paradigmatic by which he agreed to direct commercial bounds of mainstream fi lms. As far as Buñuel projects in exchange for the chance to make was concerned, he was busy developing his more personal fi lms.26 In these productions new, smoothly inconspicuous cinematic style he slowly but surely brought his surrealism to and seemingly following Hollywood’s and the the fore, employing it to skewer machismo, MMC’s “unobtrusiveness principle.” Until, that burlesque the bourgeoisie, and challenge the is, he tossed in another of his recurring “ir- narrative bedrock of Hollywood and MMC rational sparks” and derailed a fi lm’s narrative fi lmmaking—the happy ending. But even in fl ow. Ever the wily surrealist, Buñuel used his more commercial outings, Buñuel, the the MMC style in order to sabotage it. most consistently surrealist fi lmmaker in the Third, CMC was ideologically opposi- history of cinema, found ways to smuggle in tional. In large measure, the CMC’s opposition his irrational, dreamlike imagery. stemmed from a nationalistic impulse that Second, CMC fi lms purposely drew atten- was rooted in the 1910–20 revolution and that tion to their style. A fundamental aspect of led to a corresponding revolution in the arts. the Hollywood paradigm was the understand- Turning their backs on European and North ing that a fi lm’s style should never call atten- American infl uences, Mexican artists sought tion to itself, an unwritten rule adopted by to discover, defi ne, and promote a native aes- MMC directors and producers. CMC fi lmmak- thetic. CMC fi lmmakers followed suit. As such, ers, by contrast, produced fi lms with formal the CMC style was a declaration of cinematic elements that were meant to stand out and be independence whose overarching goal was to

10 The Classical Mexican Cinema

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 1010 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM create movies that proclaimed mexicanidad. just as subversive, oppositional, and anti- Aligning itself with contemporaneous nation- establishment as the rest—if not more so— alistic movements in all the Mexican arts, the he was not part of the nationalistic project. CMC aesthetic in eff ect asserted that its fi lms Rather, his ideological opposition stemmed had succeeded in capturing the authentic from a lifelong commitment to surrealism, Mexico, while MMC moviemaking—for all its whose primary motivation was the disman- Mexican characters, colorful colloquialisms, tling of the bourgeois status quo. “The real familiar locales, popular songs, and folkloric purpose of surrealism,” Buñuel wrote, “was costumes—had not. . . . to explode the social order, to transform From the vantage point of CMC fi lmmak- life itself.”27 Still, Buñuel was allied with the ers, the MMC had failed because its fi lms were other CMC fi lmmakers because in attacking imitative of—one could even say infected the status quo, he challenged the MMC. by—the dominant Hollywood fi lmmak- Of course, every fi lm carries ideological ing paradigm. Aft er all, Hollywood’s was a content, wittingly or not. What I want to foreign style, developed to depict American suggest is that the Classical Mexican Cinema’s characters engaged in the American experi- ideological program was explicit, whereas the ence, and never meant to convey lo mexicano. politics of the MMC were typically implicit This diff erence becomes strikingly evident in and unthinking. Moreover, the ideology the analysis of the dramatic structure of CMC embedded in the MMC’s narratives typically fi lms, which reveals how many were tragedies celebrated the Mexican status quo—not that broke away from Hollywood’s and the surprising, since it was conveyed via a fi lmic MMC’s standard three-act, happy-ending for- style that was adopted from Hollywood. mula. The CMC was more pro-Mexican than From the Classical Mexican Cinema perspec- rabidly anti-American, however. For Mexico tive, then, the Mainstream Mexican Cinema to fl ourish aft er the revolution, the thinking was hopelessly conservative and retrograde. went, it needed to fi nd its true identity. This In eff ect, the CMC was fi lmmaking that said, was as true of national politics as it was of “We fought a revolution to blaze new artistic the arts. Consequently, Mexican cinema, as trails and create a new form of cinematic de Fuentes, Fernández, and Figueroa argued, expression for Mexico, not to revert to the must be part of that nationalistic identifi ca- status quo ante and copy foreign fi lmmak- tion eff ort. ing models.” The CMC point of view was that The subjects of my analyses, artist José fi lmmakers who relied on conventional fi lm- Guadalupe Posada and fi lmmakers Enrique making imitative of the Hollywood paradigm Rosas, Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernán- were merely another sign of how thoroughly dez and Gabriel Figueroa, Juan Bustillo Oro, the revolution had failed. Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho, were all involved in this nation-defi ning mission, These, then, are the defi ning characteristics either implicitly (Posada and Rosas) or explic- of the Classical Mexican Cinema, the fi lms itly (the others). Luis Buñuel, however, the and fi lmmakers that I analyze in this book. focus of chapter 7, was a special case. Though Not every fi lm the CMC auteurs made was

RETHEORIZING MEXICAN FILM HISTORY 11

BBerg_5146_BK.indderg_5146_BK.indd 1111 66/4/15/4/15 99:48:48 AMAM memorable, commercially or artistically suc- neither disregarding their importance nor cessful, cinematically innovative, or ideo- questioning their stature in Mexican fi lm his- logically confrontational. But many were, tory. And I’m certainly not denying the fact and focusing on the groundbreaking fi lms that they are immensely entertaining, impor- from these fi lmmakers’ output reveals their tant, and enjoyable. They are all those things, individualistic styles, their aesthetic goals, something that the appearance of so many and their ideological intentions. This book of them on the Somos list confi rms. They are is dedicated to analyzing those fi lms that absent here because stylistically they adhered exhibited these three characteristics, were to—rather than deviated from—dominant aesthetically signifi cant, and were cinemati- Mexican and Hollywood fi lmmaking norms cally exhilarating. The fi lms, that is, that were of the time. artistically and ideologically special: the My focus here is the Classical Mexican exceptional fi lms of the Golden Age. Cinema, a remarkable body of work made by Distinguishing between the MMC and fi lmmakers consciously striving to forge a na- Classical Mexican Cinema in this way means tive cinematic form, express lo mexicano, and that I had to omit many popular and beloved avoid imitating Hollywood. This book is the Cine de Oro fi lms—movies that are com- story of how, against the odds, they succeeded monly accepted as part of Mexico’s cinematic in fi nding a Mexican way to say something canon, feature popular stars of the time, and memorable, meaningful, and true about the appear on the Somos list of the best Mexican national experience. fi lms of all time. In excluding these fi lms, I’m

12 The Classical Mexican Cinema

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